One of the core questions in this conversation is a simple one: What’s the difference between storytelling that resonates with people, and storytelling that actually moves them to act?
For Olivia Becker, the answer isn’t theoretical. The political videos she helped make during Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign didn’t work because they were especially clever or optimized for virality. They worked because they were embedded in something much more durable — a years-long, volunteer-driven organizing effort built on canvassing, repetition, and trust.
As she says plainly in the interview, the videos aren’t why people voted. They’re why people noticed. The real work was happening at the doors.
A few of the ideas we dig into:
Why visibility and conversion are not the same thing
Why the team avoided memes, stunts, and viral shortcuts
How a documentary sensibility shaped the campaign’s tone and visual language
What it meant to treat the campaign as an unfolding narrative rather than a series of ads
We also talk about specific moments that clarified this approach, including filming Bernie Sanders with Mamdani in what Olivia describes as a genuine “passing of the torch,” and the decision to release a quiet, verité-style video on election night that resisted polish in favor of presence.
Now inside City Hall as Director of Video, Olivia is thinking about what it might mean for a mayor’s office to take storytelling seriously as a civic function — not just as communications. That includes telling the stories of municipal workers most people never see, making opaque processes like budgets and executive orders legible, and experimenting with formats that feel closer to film than press content.
What Olivia is describing is a public role is the arts that is more dependent on trust than reach. Effective political storytelling isn’t primarily about amplification. It’s about whether the story is connected to a system that can absorb it — whether there’s organizing behind it, accountability after it, and responsibility attached to it.
I think independent filmmakers should consider taking the same approach, thinking about the depth of the connection with their core audience, rather than competing for the most attention across the most platforms. Who knows, it may lead to real action.
